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While British Columbians have been preoccupied by the debate over oil pipelines, our neighbours in Washington state have been duking it out over their own environmental issue lately.

Their fight is over coal.

That fight, ultimately, could have a profound effect not only on the global environment but on ours as well.

At issue are plans to develop a project called the Gateway Pacific Terminal at Cherry Point near Ferndale, Wash. Cherry Point is 25 kilometres south of the international border. Two large oil refineries exist there already.

If built, the Gateway Pacific Terminal would dwarf Roberts Bank and supplant it as the largest coal exporting facility in North America. Plans call for a maximum exporting capacity of 54 million metric tonnes annually, 48 million tonnes of which would be coal. In comparison, the Westshore Terminals at Roberts Bank, even after its recent new expansion, exported just over 26 million tonnes of coal in 2012.

“We’re watching the development,” said Westshore general manager Denis Horgan, “with some interest.”

The Cherry Point coal would come mainly from the Powder River Basin in Montana (where Westshore also gets some of its coal) and coal trains would come down the Columbia River Gorge and then up through the Puget Sound coast, passing through Tacoma, Seattle, Edmonds, Everett, Mount Vernon, Bellingham and Ferndale.

The terminal would be able to handle nine coal trains a day, which would mean there would be 18 coal-train transits a day (nine full, nine empty) along the line, and the trains would be made up of about 150 cars. Each train would be 2.4 kilometres long.

The coal would then be loaded onto cargo ships at Cherry Point. Vessels would be either Panamax class – up to 300 metres long and capable of carrying 50,000 to 80,000 tonnes – or the even larger Capesize class, which can carry, on average, 150,000 to 200,000 tonnes.

If built to capacity, the Gateway Pacific Terminal could load up to 487 ships a year, meaning 974 transits of the Strait of Juan de Fuca annually. Already, the three Cherry Point oil terminal berths are the source of 850 annual transits through the Juan de Fuca.

If Kinder Morgan is allowed to expand the carrying capacity of its Trans Mountain pipeline through B.C., the Juan de Fuca will see a big jump in transits originating from Vancouver harbour. Last year, 71 oil tankers shipped out of Vancouver: With the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline, it could mean anywhere between 20 and 30 oil tankers a month would ship out of Vancouver.

The potential growth in oil tanker traffic here and coal carrier traffic out of Cherry Point should be a concern to the public on both sides of the border. The Juan de Fuca is now one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, and sees more than 10,000 ship transits a year.

As part of the environmental review of the Gateway Pacific proposal, public hearings have been held in the affected communities since October. In contrast to the tightly controlled and sequestered hearings for the Northern Gateway pipeline proposal now being held in Vancouver, the Gateway Pacific hearings have been big and raucous and very, very public.

In mid-December, more than 2,300 people attended a hearing at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle, and the crowd, according to a Seattle Times story, was predominantly anti-coal. (Speakers at that event were selected by lottery after it was revealed by the Spokane Review newspaper that backers of the coal project had hired temporary workers to stand in line and hold down spots for pro-coal speakers at the public hearing in Spokane.)

The two sides of the debate represent the usual positions in issues such as these – the Environment versus Jobs. The anti-coal side points to the noise and disruption of huge coal trains in urban areas, their effect on property values, the immediate environmental damage caused by airborne coal dust, the public monies that would be needed for upgrades along the line, and the effect that burning coal has on global warming and the acidification of the oceans. The pro-coal side points to the creation of as many as 1,250 permanent jobs, as much as $11 million a year in local and state tax revenue annually, and a construction and 10-year operating period that could generate almost $2 billion in economic activity.

In other words, the same arguments being made here for oil are being made there for coal.

As it stands now, B.C. is doing all the coal exporting on the North American west coast, and there are plans to increase capacity at Prince Rupert’s Ridley Island terminal, the Fraser Surrey Docks in Surrey and the Neptune Terminals in Vancouver harbour.

But the Americans want to get in on the act. In light of flagging domestic sales of coal because of the increase in use of natural gas, there’s renewed pressure in the U.S. to take advantage of Asian markets. Longview, Wash., is considering a coal port application, Portland is musing about renewing coal exports there and there is talk of two exporting facilities on the Columbia River. Coal, it seems, is on the rise.

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